


Tipping Over

by stardust_made



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Pining, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-03
Updated: 2012-11-03
Packaged: 2017-11-17 16:55:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/553803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardust_made/pseuds/stardust_made
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek is recalling the first time it happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tipping Over

 

Derek is recalling the first time it happened.

Everyone was at _Jungle_. Derek was there too. When your pack was still new, when all of them were turned and not born werewolves, when all of them were vulnerable, the alpha had to be there. Not the first time he had questioned his sound mind when choosing _teenagers_ to make his own pack. Teenagers were volatile, hormonal, unreliable. They had the attention span of small woodland creatures, and often their priorities, too. Eat, sleep, play. Mate. Occasionally not in that order. That night Derek would have easily picked a woodland creature over any of his pack members. Woodland creatures didn’t go clubbing. Teenagers did, and there was just no stopping them.

It was Danny’s birthday. That night Danny was still just the dark-haired guy who had drooled discreetly at the sight of Derek’s semi-naked body, courtesy of Stiles’s shameless, manipulative pimping. And at _that_ time Stiles himself had still been the incessantly thinking, fidgeting, talking… _thing_ shadowing Scott everywhere.

No. Stiles had also been eyes. Derek remembers that. At the very beginning the still snapshot for Stiles was his eyes. Nothing about their shape or colour was distinctive enough to warrant that. Or to warrant the strength of the visual, either: so intensely bright.

But the trip down memory lane isn’t about the early days. It’s about that night at _Jungle_.

The club was full to the brim. Derek had picked himself a very dark corner, mostly so that he remained undisturbed by a flow of drinks and half-lidded invitations to dance. It was ironic how much time he had spent choosing what to wear that night so that he _didn’t_ get noticed. Experience told him it was in vain. He could show up in his most tattered t-shirt and most worn-out jeans and nothing would be different. In fact, that night he had, and nothing _was_ different. He still needed to hide in a corner. It would have been extremely distracting to constantly decline various offers, and Derek had genuinely worried he would run out of patience and start wolfing out while the night was still young.

It was a long night. Interminable. It was a recipe for his personal Chinese torture. The light, the sheer amount of light sources. Derek lived in a house with _no electricity_. And that was aside from the tiny fact that he was a werewolf—a dark forest was his natural habitat at night.

A quiet forest too. So quiet.

With no humans; no breaths, no scents, no pulses, no body heat.

Because that tiny fact? It was also at the heart of the huge fact that Derek’s werewolf senses were a blessing, but primarily in said black, silent forest. At the club he was drowning in the torrent of stimuli, collapsing under their thick, overwhelming assault. He is very good at some things, though. Back at the club he had managed to wane each sense, while simultaneously honing them all to listen, observe, smell. Keeping that up had left him nauseated within the first hour and a half.

Everything had felt off. He couldn’t let his anger ground him, not in such a public place, and not when he had to be alert. He couldn’t drink. He couldn’t prowl, either. He couldn’t mix with the crowd, not with _that_ particular crowd. One of the bolder teenagers, whose name Derek still doesn’t know, an anonymous face in the mass of Beacon Hills High School’s finest, had put it quite aptly at the entrance. “Oh man,” the boy had said looking Derek up and then when he saw him show up with Erica. “They’re going to _eat_ you in there.” Derek was not without a sense of humor, but he had to quash all suitable replies that sprang to mind. One of which was a growl. He still cherished the moment of dead silence which followed from his circle.

No, that’s wrong. Stiles had been the only one, of course he had—he had made a sound suspiciously like a giggle, but that’s not about that moment, either. Derek’s memories just won’t get in order.

He had decided that showing up with Erika as her date was going to be the least conspicuous option. The fact that it was a gay club didn’t matter. Derek could not choose Boyd over Isaac or vice versa; any preference would have introduced unnecessary competitive tension between his two male betas. Jackson was with Lydia, Scott was with Allison. And there was no one else, as far as he could see.

Life was simple back then. Funny how people often equate that to better.

It was around one that he was unable to stay still anymore. His head was pounding. It wasn’t excruciating, not at all. Derek’s threshold of pain is a thing of beauty—or possibly horror, depending on where you stand along the cruel line called ‘norm’. But there was no need for him to suffer unnecessarily. His guard had dropped a bit, too, more effectively worn down by dull ache than by sharp pain. So he moved around, eyes fixing on Erica as soon as he felt someone else’s eyes on him. Erica was obviously taking the local scene very seriously and was engaged with another girl in the kind of dance that would have made them both rich had there been a different kind of clientele. Still, Derek’s diversion worked; everyone followed his gaze and figured he was just a straight guy getting off on seeing two girls getting it on with each other.

On Derek’s _To Do_ list at the time ‘getting off’ was placed somewhere between ‘having a flu shot’ and ‘learning how to play the cello’. It just wasn’t… _there_ , anywhere in the conscious part of his mind. He hadn’t even noticed its exclusion, or none of the exclusions that were glaring in hindsight. Not even when Stiles had popped up through the smoke earlier in the evening, face stretched in a goofy grin and some beverage sloshing in a cup in his hand, and had informed him that any possibility of death for Derek that night was only going to come through his total, tragic, flagrant inability to have fun. He had used the actual word ‘flagrant’. Derek remembers that as clearly as the moon is bright. But this isn’t about that moment, either.

It’s getting harder. He needs to focus. Thankfully, the moment he _is_ conjuring up will serve him perfectly for that.

The discordance of voices, whispers, variations of skin on skin sounds; the smells of hundreds of aftershaves and deodorants, alcohol, sperm; all the kaleidoscopic lights—it hadn’t managed to do it. What scrambled Derek whoopingly,  striking cruel and deep, was the sledgehammer of all the condensed _feelings_ into one tiny spot. Fears, hopes, arousal, love, dejection, panic, elation, confusion, confusion, confusion…

For a moment it had become unbearable. Then he bore it, naturally—that’s what he did. That’s what he does. He stood there in the churning sea of humanity and bodies, and he slowly reined himself in, roaring silently at the gigantic tidal waves raising within him, called to the shore: pain for pain, fear for fear— like for like. He still doesn’t know how long it took him. It could have been a minute, it could have been a few seconds. It was the kind of battle where the fallen soldiers had better remained nameless and a man was his own worst enemy. Derek  is forgiven for not keeping track of time.

He fought, and he won. He remembers standing there, just on the outside of the dancing crowd. Blinking back into the real world, his mind strangely empty and lulled. He felt tired, stifled a yawn. His shoulders drooped with the kind of relaxation brought only by the sense of security that the worst was over and you’d come through it alright.

And then it happened.

His eyes fell on Stiles. Stiles was dancing. There was still a cup in his hand, but his smile wasn’t goofy. It was just a smile, unselfconscious, his own. All around Stiles people were moving, some pressing into each other, others exchanging glances; some were kissing for their lives’ worth. Derek was sure that only a moment ago Stiles had been oozing insecurity and awkwardness from the desperate need to fit in with all that, to have a place. Derek was sure he was exuding the same a moment later, too. But in that instant Stiles projected such unattainable, wonderful, _terrifying_ self-containment that Derek felt his own heart would burst.

It never ceases to amaze Derek how accurate this particular memory has remained in its details: all to the last one precious and ordinary. Stiles swaying, with only his head moving sharply to the sound. All his movements for once in perfectly harmony to the tune, to the beat, to the entire fucking universe. Stiles’s heartbeat, too, certain and mortal and so distinctively his that Derek had genuinely felt the cold pinch of panic of never being able to hear anyone else’s heartbeat, _ever_ again. (He rarely panics; he saves it for when he has a proper cause for it.) Generic jeans, generic dark blue t-shirt, generic long-sleeved top tied around the waist. The intoxicating potion of Stiles’s scents, all of them at once; Derek can start picking them out right now: the soap, the musk, the clean, barely salty, barely nutty scent of perspiration. The clover and the warm milk—both Stiles’s skin. The faintest trace of alcohol, the aimless arousal, ink, paper, chewing gum…

Or how about this list of visuals: the damp trail of Stiles’s hair at the neck, the flash of his healthy teeth between his parted, smiling, pink lips, unconsciously sampling the whole world, getting ready for it. The dance of his eyelashes like the feathers of a crane in flight. The mouth-drying white stretch of his throat…

This is wrong. The details aren’t bringing focus. They bring oblivion this time, and that’s not good.

Besides, what turned the moment into _a moment_ was not just details packed in together to blow Derek’s world to pieces. It was all those things that aren’t supposed to smell or have a taste or a visual.

Stiles. Stiles was golden innocence bottled into a glass of flesh, bone, and hunger for life. He was the essence of himself at that fixed period of his life with the smokey, heady hint of things to come.  He was an awkward boy on the verge of manhood. Someone with an incredible mind in a body full of potential. A punch of sarcastic beauty. Stiles was someone who was having a really good time and for one long moment had managed to obliterate the entire world and _be_ who he was without any effort.

And Derek wanted to grab across and take that bottle for himself, hide it, get drunk on its contents and be obliterated, too.

He walked out to get some fresh air instead.

It’s a good memory, one of his most favourite; he’s glad he sought that one out. He can pretend he is finally lifting the bottle to his lips, tipping it. He can imagine that gold spreading through him, nothing like silver, the very antidote of silver, and how can someone, just that one person be the antidote of everything poisonous, vile, of death? But Derek knows it without a shadow of a doubt. He can close his eyes now and think of gold, think of—

“Over here,” someone’s shrill, shaking voice calls. There is a thunder of steps rushing in from everywhere, disturbing all that dust; there are flashes of light as well. Then someone else cradles his head and Derek opens his mouth, ready to taste at last.

“Derek, “Stiles says his name, breathless, urgent. “Derek, just hang on, all right, just—Plea—please, just hang on. They’re on their way.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> My foray into "Teen Wolf" fanfic. (I don't think it'll come as a big surprise that I blame it entirely on Stiles.) I hope you enjoyed!  
> Beta by the lovely, lovely [sirona](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sirona/pseuds/sirona).


End file.
